Ignore the Ignorant

Smiths guitar hero Johnny Marr joins one of the brightest lights of post-Libertines UK rock for their fourth album.

Halfway through the Cribs' new album, singer/bassist Gary Jarman issues a plea to remember him like "last year's snow," but really, the Yorkshire band should be feeling a little more secure in their standing within the mod-eat-mod world of Britpop. Not only have the band lived to see their fourth album-- while other post-Libertines peers like the Others and the View get cast aside like so much NME roadkill-- their chart placements keep going up; Ignore the Ignorant recently hit No. 8 in the UK. And the band have been equally successful at turning its heroes into collaborators; having previously enlisted the services of everyone from Bobby Conn and Orange Juice's Edwyn Collins to Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, the Cribs are now living out the ultimate indie pop fantasy-camp dream by recruiting Smiths guitar hero Johnny Marr as a full-fledged official fourth member. That development may seem less staggering given Marr's recent Modest Mouse tenure, but while the guitarist was absorbed into that band's backwoods art-funk framework, the crystalline guitar pop heard on Ignore the Ignorant-- produced by Public Image Ltd./Birthday Party vet Nick Launay-- leaves little doubt as to who's taking cues from whom.

Marr's presence is immediately felt on opening track "We Were Aborted", which fills in the spaces between the Cribs' usual staccato-riff schematic with counter-melodies that give the song more room to breathe without sacrificing its pressurized thrust, rendering it a distant British cousin to the Foo Fighters' "Everlong". This transformative process-- from post-punky pub-rockers to graceful pop songsmiths-- plays out all through Ignore the Ignorant, though not without its growing pains. As a band fond of naming indie rock influences that are several degrees more idiosyncratic than the music they actually produce, the Cribs are prone to hampering their songs' increasingly dignified presentations with screaming; the hoarse chorus howls on gleaming lead single "Cheat on Me" feel overly melodramatic, and the circa-1963 slow dance reverie of "Save Your Secrets" is upended by a lumbering, overwrough [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| t middle eight that feels like it barged in from another song. The six-minute anomaly "City of Bugs", meanwhile, sees the Cribs stretching out into nocturnal, Sonic Youthian terrain, but despite Ryan Jarman's best attempts at Thurston Moore-like sing-speak, the song just feels like an excuse to unleash some string-snapping guitar squall.

Ignore the Ignorant fares much better when the Cribs keep their contrarian tendencies in check and remind themselves that, "holy shit, we've got Johnny fucking Marr in our band!" Compared to Morrissey's oblique but resonant lyricism, the Jarmans deal in provocative sound-bite slogans (e.g., "your virility has made me forget empathy"), but the Cribs prove themselves worthy successors to a lineage of cheekily erudite Britpop that spans David Bowie (see: the "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" sway of "Stick to Yr Guns") through to the Smiths ( the "Panic"-style swing of the title track) to Pulp (the rather excellent "We Share the Same Skies", a shot of organ-swathed jangle-pop urgency would fit snugly on His 'n' Hers). And in the jubilant Jam-ready rocker "Victim of Mass Production", the Cribs seem to finally accept their status as a pop commodity beholden to the "powers that be." They might never acquire the iconoclastic cool of a Sonic Youth, but a Top 10 fate is certainly one they can live with, because, as the Jarmans sing in unison, "we're not supposed to be here anyway."